Grace Springer captured one of the viral videos of the year when she documented a tech CEO and his head of HR—one married and one recently divorced—looking hot and heavy on a kiss-cam at a Coldplay concert.
Now, Springer has spoken to the media and issued a message to Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot, the people she exposed: you had it coming.
After posting the TikTok video of Byron and Cabot on Wednesday night and seeing it rack up 46 million views in a day, Springer told The U.S. Sun on Friday that a part of her “feels bad for turning these people’s lives upside down.”
However, she also had these choice words for the couple: “Play stupid games… win stupid prizes.”
A huge Coldplay fan, the 28-year-old Springer traveled from New Jersey to Massachusetts to watch the band play Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. There, she took the video which has become an internet sensation and spawned multiple fake apologies on social media—which also, of course, went viral.
Springer’s video plays out like a slow-motion car crash: when the kiss-cam pivots to Byron and Cabot, Cabot is the first to realize their predicament, covering her face with her hands and pivoting away from the camera. Byron, meanwhile, becomes red as a tomato and ducks out of the frame as if he is dodging a projectile.
All the while, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin reacted in real time to the disconcerting reaction with an all-too prescient line: “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”
The whole exchange was captured in Springer’s TikTok, captioned with the line “trouble in paradise??”
Springer told The U.S. Sun that she had “no idea” who the couple was when she posted her TikTok. “Just thought I caught an interesting reaction to the kiss cam and decided to post it.” Since the posting, Springer’s video has generated endless internet memes and speculation.
Online sleuths quickly figured out that the video starred Byron, the CEO of AI unicorn Astronomer, and Cabot, the company’s chief people officer. Byron is married to Megan Kerrigan Byron, who removed her last name and then deleted her Facebook account in the wake of the video. Cabot is reportedly divorced, as of 2022.
Springer, for her part, wished the couple well despite their faux pas: “I hope, for them, my video was a blessing in disguise.”
Prior to Springer’s video, the only publicly known link between Byron and Cabot was a press release that Astronomer made announcing Cabot’s hiring in Nov. 2024. In that release, Byron praised Cabot’s “exceptional leadership and deep expertise in talent management.”
Cabot was quoted then as saying that “the real magic happens when you align the people strategy with the business strategy.”
Unfortunately, ColdplayGate may have aligned the “people strategy” and “business strategy” too well.
